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3D Printing Stress Test – The Subdivision Bracelet

It’s a particularly complicated shape, and will require a lot of support material. This is a bit of an experiment in just how well my Afinia printer can handle this complex an object, and a bit of an experiment in cleanup, and maintaining sanity, as I’m sure it will take me over an hour to remove all the unwanted plastic from this piece.

Here is a sample someone printed on the site:

The print is scheduled to take almost five hours.

Here it is on my print bed, just over half finished.

Note that while a lot of it is just planes of support material, you can see sneaky little peeks of the design in there, and I’m really hoping this works out.

I’m printing this for my daughter to wear.

This may also be a good example of an object to test the acetone vapor-bath concept – which involves laying down a layer of acetone in an enclosed container, with a metal rack sitting above it, not touching it, and the printed part goes in for a given amount of time. The longer it stays in, the smoother and shinier it gets, removing the stepping edges from the part. I haven’t tried this yet, but this object would look awesome smoothed out.

Will post updates when it’s finished, showing the messy cleanup and the final product, I hope.

Update: Apparently you can design your own complex cell shapes at this website: n-e-r-v-o-u-s.

Update: I printed it. Here it is on the print bed, completed:

Here, I begin the cleanup by pulling it off the raft:

Then I begin removal of the support material:

You can see the outer design showing through nicely here. Sadly, however, it is hard to remove the support material without breaking the structure of the bracelet. I counted twice where I had broken a valid part of the bracelet. I can always glue those pieces to re-secure them, but this is a lot of trouble so far.

It’s at this point, where I have the entire outer surface cleaned that I realize not only do I have the entire inner surface to clean, but the space between the two. There is a space between the outer and inner edges, and all of that is absolutely filled with support material, each little strand of which I will have to remove bit by bit with pliers.

And I printed it 1cm or so too small to fit over my daughter’s hand.

As I said. This was just an experiment. I probably will not continue to clean this one. I’ll probably print a larger one and clean that instead.